


He Staggered

by Caitlebug



Category: Weiß Kreuz
Genre: Angst, Assassins & Hitmen, Fluff and Angst, Grief/Mourning, Homoeroticism, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Male Homosexuality, Male Slash, POV Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-20
Updated: 2019-08-20
Packaged: 2020-09-19 02:40:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20323723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caitlebug/pseuds/Caitlebug
Summary: *Repost of an older fic with some touch-ups*Aya's partner staggers during a mission gone wrong.--------------------------------------------------------------





	1. He Staggered

He staggered.

I saw his beautiful body, tall and thin under that leather coat, misstep and tilt. His right leg wilted where it had been placed and that well-trained professional lurched.

He hit the wall with his shoulder, hard.

It was not uncommon for our tasks to exhaust us, nor was it uncommon for us to be injured and maimed. I had seen him falter before and I had understood that each time it occurred was probably not to be the last. I had seen him bleed and wince and cry out in pain, time and again. 

But this time was different.

His right arm hung suddenly stiff and ungainly, as if a weight tied to his wrist was dropped to hang. It unbalanced him, tripped him, and he fell out of sight. In the moment it took to blink, he had hit the wall like a tree felled in too narrow a space to drop flat, his left hand rising to brace but finding no grip. In the moment it took to suck in a breath, he slid down with a smear of fluid.

Fuck.

There was chaos in the hallway. There were bullets and screams and smoke. I could smell the iron-sharp residue of gun discharge and I felt the adrenaline pumping like poison in my veins. Better than the worst of drugs, my legs were charging as my hands sought to shake, and I was listening only to the blood in my ears. I could see it all and yet I was not really seeing anything. That was, until I saw him stagger.

I confess that I dont know if I truly turned to look. It was not like in the movies where a scene slows down to excruciating detail, as if to make fodder for memory to do torturous things. That supposed moment when my eyes left the target and focused on him may not have been. But it didn’t matter what I saw or didn’t, because the information was there and wouldn’t go away. My gloves where slick with blood, my coat covered and sticky with what was oozing out onto the floor and spraying the walls around me. There really were too many bodies in the corridor, moving and unmoving, alive and dead. Unlikely as it was that in all the figures I was able to take in my partner’s movements, it didn’t stop the hairs on the back of my neck from rising in sudden clarity. 

A whole new sort of terror had entered the scene; because, although I had seen him falter before, I had never seen him fall.

My instincts sought for control and I must have made some sort of deafening noise. Glaring as I was at the target marked for death, I knew it could be nothing other than me that made that sneering face whiten with fear. There had been obstacles in my path, but under my rage they evaporated like so much filth in a downpour. I put my sword directly into heart and smelled rancid breath as it choked out its final disbelief; I wrenched arteries into pieces as I pulled it free.

And yet, as I stared at the life eeking from the hole in that ravaged chest, something came over me that never had before. I let out a sob of a sound, a quick breath of despair caught halfway out of my throat and quickly smothered back down. A stilted thing, and divorced, my body jerked with it and I knew: he was dead. His beautiful blonde hair would be matted to his head, soaked with sweat and work, mussed from battling terrors in the deep night. His eyes, his green green eyes, would be dull like a dolls, unblinking and unseeing. And for the first time, he wouldn’t be there to lead me home after a slaughter, to fish the human part of my soul free from the depths of horror that was slowly choking it.

When I turned around I knew I would see him as he was, leaning against that wall that could never catch as well as human arms, crumpled down in a violent scene of pooled blood and twisted leather. He would be smiling, his spattered face grinning in cynical defeat, watching me even as I stood and he breathed no more. Wire would lay like unwound twine, haphazard about his leaning frame, forever tangled and tarnished.

I knew I would see him and it just wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that he should have staggered on this night of all nights; that he should have fallen when he never had before.

The ringing noise of shuffling and sweating bodies slowly died down with the pounding of my pulse and it became clear to me that all along this many people had been standing, living, fighting, and dying within a space not more than 20 feet long. If I turned, I could probably be at his side in less than two strides.

Two strides had been the difference between possibilities this night.

But I didn’t turn. I couldn’t. Not with the scent of him still rebounding in the hallows of my skull, not with the feel of his hands still running on my skin, and not with the need for him to stand up, stand up, and never having strangely misstepped.

How…how was I to go on from this moment? I had never done it before, never been alone in the aftermath. When the smoke clears, he steps out and finds me in the fold of his arms with his face in the crook of my neck. What was I to do without?

Paralyzed where I stood, the communicator in my ear hissed, calling for attention.

_Youji! Youji!_ It was calling, repeating what my thoughts had begun to chant.

_Youji! Report! What happened over there?_


	2. I Hate Their Eyes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> *New chapter to a (previously) stand-alone fic*
> 
> A few days after he's gone, all the well-wishers come calling. -Another angsty Aya introspective.  
\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Omi whispers next to me, telling me I’m scaring everyone, have been for days. He says that I look like a messenger of death with glares that freeze right down to the soul. He chides me to blink instead of stare, because the way I look at them is unnerving if not unkind.Don’t be so cold, he sighs, they’ve only come to show their respects. He frowns when he says it, like it’s a reprimand. Others don’t know, he says, but his face pleads: can’t they also be in pain; didn’t they also lose something precious?

And I remember: before he died, he used to say similar things to me.

He used to say that you can read a person from how they look at the world, can read what kind of soul they carried all in how much gets in and how much leaks out through their eyes.

He said that my eyes were good at glaring. And that because of that, or perhaps despite that, they were what gave me away.

He told me my eyes were cold; that there was a wall that didn’t let anything into my center. There was a distance in my eyes, he said, where most people received information, and a hatred that blazed where most people convey. My eyes had depth, he said. A cold, horrible abyss that was forbidden to all but the brave and stupid; and those were the ones that die trying.

He would smiled when he said these things, and I would stare at his mouth when he spoke, watching it curl at the edges. I would watch it tell me not to hate someone for having good fortune, that they can’t help that they don’t know enough to see their luck. I would watch it twitch before it told me to look up and look wider, and I wouldn’t because I knew the smirk didn’t go far enough and I couldn’t stand to look at him straight. For if my eyes were cold, his were hard. To meet them was to know that there was nothing innocent or blameless there, and that they were far from harmless.

No, those eyes were ruthless, unforgiving; his eyes _knew_. They dug for things forbidden and better left buried, and when they met mine it was war, always. Ugly war, where I was judged harshly.

I hated him for it, more and more, and I plotted his death for the sake of escape. That he knew that as well and still stared where he shouldn’t was the danger of him. How to put into time and space a man whose eyes reflected my desire for murder and didn’t blink?

To think Omi called _me_ unnerving.

That man had waited. He did not tire or shrink, but taunted until my nerves were tight to snapping. And in the end, when I did snap, it was not the steel of my plans but hot and pliant, and in my disbelief he was all too ready to take me in.

I came to crave that impudence like breath, as he knew I would.

He taught me then that our singularity will not go undisturbed, that our autonomy will be questioned. He taught me that no matter how many barriers I put up, someday something will come knocking, banging, crashing, and will get through. Life is about collisions, he would smirk, and even in the most innocuous situations, people are attacking each other, aren’t they? I knew what he meant. If not with their bodies, then with their minds, pushing and prodding with their words and silences, and, especially, their eyes. Eyes that were always seeking entrance to deeper, darker places.

And so when his eyes found me, there was nothing for it. He had swam the abyss and he hammered down the wall, and I saw him see me. He framed me there in his gaze and shoved back. The cruelty was later, when parts kept so rigidly in began to tumble out, and he became both the sickness and the cure. How I needed him to see me then, to trace me in the pools of his pupils, so that I could _be_; I needed him to hold me together in ways I no longer could.

Somewhere along the line, I stopped hating. Somewhere along the line, he stopped looking and started feeling, gripped me by my skin and grabbed my soul. Somewhere along the line, it became okay to use my eyes to see instead of hurt. Somewhere along the line…the line disappeared and I stopped defining where solely I began. I knew myself through him.

And then, just like that, he was gone. Vanished. Dead. Like so much dust in the wind, scattered without form or memory. He fell and those eyes I had hated and needed fell with him, the life gone out of them as they saw nothing, not me, not anything, any more.

And now. Now Omi tells me I’m scaring everyone. That I look like a messenger of death; that I don’t blink and it’s unnerving; that I stare, and stare, with nothing but coldness reflecting back.

Omi says this and chides me to not be so cold. Others are hurting too, he says.

Others that walk around with prying, empty gazes, and no idea how lucky they are.

Well fuck them. And fuck Omi too.

Because _he_ used to say similar things before he died, and I listened then. Against my everything I listened, and I had been taken in. I had tried to look around and see like he told me too.

And now I’d ended up the fool.


End file.
